APQL : a process-model query language

As business process management technology matures, organisations acquire more and more business process models. The management of the resulting collections of process models poses real challenges. One of these challenges concerns model retrieval where support should be provided for the formulation and efficient execution of business process model queries. As queries based on only structural information cannot deal with all querying requirements in practice, there should be support for queries that require knowledge of process model semantics. In this paper we formally define a process model query language that is based on semantic relationships between tasks in process models and is independent of any particular process modelling notation.

The ethnographer as community manager : language translation and user negotiation

This article investigates the ethnographic methodological question of how the researcher observes objectively while being part of the problem they are observing. It uses a case study of ABC Pool to argue a cooperative approach that combines the roles of the ethnographer with that of a community manager who assists in constructing a true representation of the researched environment. By using reflexivity as a research tool, the ethnographer engages in a process to self-check their personal presumptions and prejudices, and to strengthen the constructed representation of the researched environment. This article also suggests combining management and expertise research from the social sciences with ethnography, to understand and engage with the research field participants more intimately - which, ultimately, assists in gathering and analysing richer qualitative data.

When digital native meets analogue reality : a case study of ICT skills in first year university students

Recently claims have been made that all universities will in coming decades merge to become just a few mega-institutions offering online degrees to the world. This assumes a degree of literacy with ICT (information and communication technology) amongst potential students, who are often regarded as 'digital natives'. Far from being digital natives, many students have considerable trouble using ICT beyond the ubiquitous Facebook. While some students are computer literate, a substantial proportion lack the skills to prosper under their own devices in an online tertiary education environment. For these students a blended learning experience is needed to develop skills to effectively interact in the virtual environment. This paper presents a case study that specifically examined the ICT capabilities of first-year university students enrolled in the School of Civil Engineering and the Built Environment at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Empirical data are presented and curriculum strategies articulated to develop ICT skills in university undergraduates.

Responding to national curriculum goals for English language learners : enhancing reading strategies in high school content areas

The official need for content teachers to teach the language features of their fields has never been greater in Australia than now. In 2012, the recently formed national curriculum board announced that all teachers are responsible for the English language development of students whose first language or dialect is not Standard Australian English (SAE). This formal endorsement is an important juncture regarding the way expertise might be developed, perceived and exchanged between content and language teachers through collaboration, in order for the goals of English language learners in content areas to be realised. To that end, we conducted an action research project to explore and extend the reading strategies pedagogy of one English language teacher who teaches English language learners in a parallel junior high school Geography program. Such pedagogy will be valuable for all teachers as they seek to contribute to English language development goals as outlined in national curricula.

A sociological quantitative study about Chineseness and Chinese heritage language for young Chinese Australian adults in urban Australia

The relationship between Heritage Language and ethnic identity has gained significant research ground in North America. However, there is a dearth of similar research conducted in other regions of the world. There seems to be little if any work investigating the link between Chinese Australians’ ethnic identity and their Chinese Heritage Language. This sociological quantitative study interpreted Chinese Australians’ “Chineseness” as their ethnic identity, linked this “Chineseness” to their Chinese Heritage Language, and did so by virtue of Bourdieu’s key concept ‘habitus’. 227 cases were analyzed by Structural Equation Modelling. The result demonstrated a statistically significant strong positive relationship between Chinese Australian urban young adults’ “Chineseness” and their self-perceptions of their Chinese Heritage Language proficiency (r=.73). This paper explained the findings in light of Bourdieu’s (1991) contention that people make choices about languages according to the habitus they have.

Language and utilisation of emergency care in Queensland

Objective: To compare access and utilisation of EDs in Queensland public hospitals between people who speak only English at home and those who speak another language at home. Methods: A retrospective analysis of a Queensland statewide hospital ED dataset (ED Information System) from 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2010 was conducted. Access to ED care was measured by the proportion of the state’s population attending EDs. Logistic regression analyses were performed to determine the relationships between ambulance use and language, and between hospital admission and language, both after adjusting for age, sex and triage category. Results: The ED utilisation rate was highest in English only speakers (290 per 1000 population), followed by Arabic speakers (105), and lowest among German speakers (30). Compared with English speakers, there were lower rates of ambulance use in Chinese (odds ratio 0.50, 95% confidence interval, 0.47–0.54), Vietnamese (0.87, 0.79–0.95), Arabic (0.87, 0.78–0.97), Spanish (0.56, 0.50–0.62), Italian (0.88, 0.80–0.96), Hindi (0.61, 0.53–0.70) and German (0.87, 0.79–0.90) speakers. Compared with English speakers, German speakers had higher admission rates (odds ratio 1.17, 95% confidence interval, 1.02–1.34), whereas there were lower admission rates in Chinese (0.90, 0.86–0.99), Arabic (0.76, 0.67–0.85) and Spanish (0.83, 0.75–0.93) speakers. Conclusion: This study showed that there was a significant association between lower utilisation of emergency care and speaking languages other than English at home. Further researches are needed using in-depth methodology to investigate if there are language barriers in accessing emergency care in Queensland.

Deformable face ensemble alignment with robust grouped-L1 anchors

Many methods exist at the moment for deformable face fitting. A drawback to nearly all these approaches is that they are (i) noisy in terms of landmark positions, and (ii) the noise is biased across frames (i.e. the misalignment is toward common directions across all frames). In this paper we propose a grouped $\mathcal{L}1$-norm anchored method for simultaneously aligning an ensemble of deformable face images stemming from the same subject, given noisy heterogeneous landmark estimates. Impressive alignment performance improvement and refinement is obtained using very weak initialization as "anchors".

Heritage language for young Chinese Australian adults in urban Australia : Capital and habitus in fields

Studies of Heritage Language learners‟ commitment and their ethnic identity are increasing, yet there is scant sociological research addressing topics relating to Chinese Heritage Language learners. Drawing on Bourdieu‟s signature notions of „habitus‟, „capital‟, and „field‟, this mixed methods study investigates two problems: (1) impacts of “Chineseness” and accessible resources on Chinese Heritage Language proficiency of young Chinese Australian adults in urban Australia; and (2) the meanings of Chinese Heritage Language to these young people.

RcppArmadillo : accelerating R with high-performance C++ linear algebra

The R statistical environment and language has demonstrated particular strengths for interactive development of statistical algorithms, as well as data modelling and visualisation. Its current implementation has an interpreter at its core which may result in a performance penalty in comparison to directly executing user algorithms in the native machine code of the host CPU. In contrast, the C++ language has no built-in visualisation capabilities, handling of linear algebra or even basic statistical algorithms; however, user programs are converted to high-performance machine code, ahead of execution. A new method avoids possible speed penalties in R by using the Rcpp extension package in conjunction with the Armadillo C++ matrix library. In addition to the inherent performance advantages of compiled code, Armadillo provides an easy-to-use template-based meta-programming framework, allowing the automatic pooling of several linear algebra operations into one, which in turn can lead to further speedups. With the aid of Rcpp and Armadillo, conversion of linear algebra centered algorithms from R to C++ becomes straightforward. The algorithms retains the overall structure as well as readability, all while maintaining a bidirectional link with the host R environment. Empirical timing comparisons of R and C++ implementations of a Kalman filtering algorithm indicate a speedup of several orders of magnitude.

Developing and benchmarking native Linux applications on Android

Smartphones get increasingly popular where more and more smartphone platforms emerge. Special attention was gained by the open source platform Android which was presented by the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) hosting members like Google, Motorola, and HTC. Android uses a Linux kernel and a stripped-down userland with a custom Java VM set on top. The resulting system joins the advantages of both environments, while third-parties are intended to develop only Java applications at the moment. In this work, we present the benefit of using native applications in Android. Android includes a fully functional Linux, and using it for heavy computational tasks when developing applications can bring in substantional performance increase. We present how to develop native applications and software components, as well as how to let Linux applications and components communicate with Java programs. Additionally, we present performance measurements of native and Java applications executing identical tasks. The results show that native C applications can be up to 30 times as fast as an identical algorithm running in Dalvik VM. Java applications can become a speed-up of up to 10 times if utilizing JNI.

Link discovery for Chinese/English cross-language web information retrieval

Nowadays people heavily rely on the Internet for information and knowledge. Wikipedia is an online multilingual encyclopaedia that contains a very large number of detailed articles covering most written languages. It is often considered to be a treasury of human knowledge. It includes extensive hypertext links between documents of the same language for easy navigation. However, the pages in different languages are rarely cross-linked except for direct equivalent pages on the same subject in different languages. This could pose serious difficulties to users seeking information or knowledge from different lingual sources, or where there is no equivalent page in one language or another. In this thesis, a new information retrieval task—cross-lingual link discovery (CLLD) is proposed to tackle the problem of the lack of cross-lingual anchored links in a knowledge base such as Wikipedia. In contrast to traditional information retrieval tasks, cross language link discovery algorithms actively recommend a set of meaningful anchors in a source document and establish links to documents in an alternative language. In other words, cross-lingual link discovery is a way of automatically finding hypertext links between documents in different languages, which is particularly helpful for knowledge discovery in different language domains. This study is specifically focused on Chinese / English link discovery (C/ELD). Chinese / English link discovery is a special case of cross-lingual link discovery task. It involves tasks including natural language processing (NLP), cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) and cross-lingual link discovery. To justify the effectiveness of CLLD, a standard evaluation framework is also proposed. The evaluation framework includes topics, document collections, a gold standard dataset, evaluation metrics, and toolkits for run pooling, link assessment and system evaluation. With the evaluation framework, performance of CLLD approaches and systems can be quantified. This thesis contributes to the research on natural language processing and cross-lingual information retrieval in CLLD: 1) a new simple, but effective Chinese segmentation method, n-gram mutual information, is presented for determining the boundaries of Chinese text; 2) a voting mechanism of name entity translation is demonstrated for achieving a high precision of English / Chinese machine translation; 3) a link mining approach that mines the existing link structure for anchor probabilities achieves encouraging results in suggesting cross-lingual Chinese / English links in Wikipedia. This approach was examined in the experiments for better, automatic generation of cross-lingual links that were carried out as part of the study. The overall major contribution of this thesis is the provision of a standard evaluation framework for cross-lingual link discovery research. It is important in CLLD evaluation to have this framework which helps in benchmarking the performance of various CLLD systems and in identifying good CLLD realisation approaches. The evaluation methods and the evaluation framework described in this thesis have been utilised to quantify the system performance in the NTCIR-9 Crosslink task which is the first information retrieval track of this kind.